This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the Bill Holm Center at the Burke Museum, a milestone for the globally accessible learning center dedicated to the study of Native arts of the Northwest.
The Center, established in 2003, honors Bill Holm (1925–2020), curator emeritus of Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum and professor emeritus of art history at the University of Washington. His work at the Burke established the groundwork for the relationships and ethical practices that still flourish today.
Learn more about the decade-long publishing partnership between the Bill Holm Center and UW Press as well as the upcoming anniversary events below.
Native Art of the Pacific Northwest: A Bill Holm Center Series
The Bill Holm Center book series aims to foster appreciation of the dynamic cultural and artistic expressions of the Indigenous peoples of the greater Pacific Northwest through the publication of important new research on Native art and culture. Guided by editors Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Robin K. Wright, the series features a variety of approaches to the history of art and expression along the Northwest Coast.
Books in the series investigate historical productions and contemporary manifestations of cultural expression as well as the important intersections between time, place, technique, and viewpoint. In the Spirit of the Ancestors celebrates the vitality of Pacific Northwest Coast art by showcasing a selection of objects from the Burke Museum’s vast collection. Return to the Land of the Head Hunters, the definitive guide to photographer Edward S. Curtis’s flawed but significant film, offers unique Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw perspectives, accounts of the film’s production and subsequent circulation, and evaluations of its depictions of cultural practice. The fiftieth anniversary edition of Bill Holm’s foundational Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form features reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of the book, which has been credited with having drawn a number of artists into their own practice.
Series publications also consider cultural knowledge and the embodiment of that knowledge in material productions from multiple and sometimes conflicting cultural perspectives, expanding understanding of the role of art in the complicated history of the region. Megan A. Smetzer’s Painful Beauty, which recently won the Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, contributes to the growing literature addressing women’s artistic expressions on the Northwest Coast. Skidegate House Models, based on Robin K. Wright’s twenty-plus years of collaborative research with the Skidegate Haida community, explores the Skidegate model village carved by Haida artists for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
This free symposium will bring together leading Native American and First Nations artists and scholars to discuss trends and recent research on the distinctive art traditions of the region. Speakers include Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda’xw of the Kwakwaka’wakw Nations), Shawn Brigman (Spokane), Joe Feddersen (Colville), Dan Friday (Lummi), Kadusné Ursala Hudson (Tlingit), James Johnson (Tlingit), and Tillie Jones (Tulalip), with opening songs from Joe Seymour (Squaxin Island/Acoma Pueblo).
Celebrate twenty years of the Bill Holm Center with an evening reception at the Burke Museum. Speakers include Evelyn Vanderhoop (Haida), Calvin Hunt (Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw), and David Boxley (Tsimshian).
Visitors to Discovery Park in Seattle will soon encounter a significant but overlooked piece of civil rights history, thanks in part to a book that brought the incident to the nation’s attention years before.
New signage installed at Fort Lawton, the former US Army post that was given to the City of Seattle and later dedicated as Discovery Park, will honor twenty-eight exonerated Black soldiers who were wrongly convicted after a series of tragic events that took place there during World War II.
On the night of August 14, 1944, an Italian prisoner of war was lynched at Fort Lawton—a murder that shocked the nation and the international community. It was a time of deep segregation in the army, and the War Department was quick to charge three Black soldiers with first-degree murder, although there was no evidence linking them to the crime. Forty other Black soldiers faced lesser charges over the incident, launching one of the largest and longest army trials of World War II. The defendants shared just two army lawyers between them who were given just ten days to prepare their case, even as some faced the death penalty.
Despite the eventual conviction of twenty-eight soldiers, it was later revealed through the research of journalists Jack Hamann and his wife, Leslie, that the prosecution, led by Leon Jaworski, was aware of flaws in the case but proceeded anyway. The Hamann’s findings, published in the book On American Soil, led to a congressional inquiry in 2006.
As a result, the army’s highest court of appeals overturned all the convictions, issued honorable discharges, and offered reparations to the defendants and their families. However, only two defendants lived long enough to receive apologies, with one dying shortly after his exoneration. Some families of the defendants have not yet been located.
The Friends of Discovery Park will unveil new signage commemorating these soldiers on Saturday, October 19, from 10:00 a.m. to noon at the Discovery Park Visitor Center. The event will feature guest speakers, including author Jack Hamann.
What was the driving force behind the writing of On American Soil?
A mysterious headstone stands sentry in a forgotten graveyard in the Fort Lawton Cemetery at Discovery Park. Thirty-seven years ago, my first attempt to unlock the story of the man buried beneath the strange column revealed a shocking set of circumstances connected to his death: A lynching of a prisoner of war in Seattle—allegedly by a mob of African Americans—that resulted in the largest and longest army court-martial of World War II, led by prosecutor Leon Jaworski. It was as unlikely an event as I could imagine, and one that almost no one in our community knew anything about.
A new sign commemorating the events of 1944, to be installed at the Discovery Park Visitor Center, references On American Soil by Jack Hamann.
In the 1980s, my first attempt to explore and explain the story of the 1944 murder of Private Guglielmo Olivotto was hobbled by a lack of time, money, and experience. At the time, my reports were primarily a rehash of the stories filed by journalists during the long, emotionally charged trial, aided by face-to-face conversations with several of the forty-three Black soldiers who stood trial for murder and/or rioting. For years afterward, I was haunted by their assertions of innocence, despite what appeared to be the US Army’s best efforts to sort out justice.
When the youngest of our two children left for college, my wife, Leslie, and I decided to revisit the story, driven by the nagging suspicion that neither we—nor the reporters in 1944—had gotten the story right. As it turned out, our suspicions were well-founded.
The book closely examines an incident of racial injustice in Seattle’s history. In your research and writing, how do you see these attitudes evolving?
I grew up believing that lynchings were primarily a scourge of the Deep South. Like many northwesterners, I assumed that our region had a relatively benign racial history. My research helped me understand just how wrong I could be.
The very first European settlements on Elliott Bay eventually adopted the hostile relations with Native peoples that plagued most of the Western Hemisphere. Soon after, migrant laborers from China suffered brutal attacks and discrimination once the backbreaking task of building rail lines was complete. For decades, Seattle’s African Americans were denied housing in all but a few neighborhoods and suffered exclusion and indignities throughout the region. Against this backdrop, thousands of Black Americans came to the Northwest during World War II, either as soldiers or seeking employment in the defense supply industry.
The tragic murder at Fort Lawton was inexorably linked to the segregation and racism of the day. As it turned out, influential people within the Truman White House understood the connection and cited the Fort Lawton incident in the successful efforts to desegregate the armed forces and to revise the military’s code of justice.
As an investigative journalist and documentary producer, what was the most exciting part of your work on this book?
During our years of research, my wife and I identified the names of more than three hundred people who were in some way connected to the Fort Lawton lynching and court-martial. The tedious process of trying to determine the whereabouts of these people—or their survivors—always carried the promise of another “Eureka!” moment, when we actually reached someone by telephone or met them face to face. Many of these sources provided crucial details or helped us understand otherwise confusing inconsistencies. It was always exciting to hear the voice of someone whose long-ago words we had been reading on yellowed paper.
A real highlight was our visits to presidential libraries and to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. It was there, after weeks of dead ends, that Leslie located the smoking gun: an amazing, lengthy report prepared by a larger-than-life army general named Elliot Cooke. The Cooke Report, as it was known, had been buried in the archives for decades, but it contained the real secrets of the Fort Lawton incident, and made the entire book possible. We knew almost immediately that a much richer and more accurate picture would emerge from that report.
Your history-making investigation shared in On American Soil was widely covered in the media and yet this notable civil rights event has remained hidden to many, particularly for new generations of Seattleites. What do you hope visitors to Discovery Park will gain from the commemorative signage that was inspired by your book?
From the moment of their earliest forced arrival as enslaved chattel, Black Americans have been treated as the “other,” subjected to relentless discrimination by our Constitution, our laws and our culture. Although the arc of history has bent ever so slowly toward justice, Black soldiers during World War II were still treated in most respects as second-class citizens. When a murder was committed on August 14, 1944, certain army officials felt entitled to “round up the usual suspects,” and to treat the defendants less as individuals and more as an interchangeable group. As much as anything, that explains how this injustice went unnoticed and uncorrected for more than forty years.
I hope the new Discovery Park signs will encourage visitors to learn more about this crucial piece of our shared history—the largest and longest US Army court-martial of World War II and the only time in American history that Black men have stood trial charged with a mob lynching—and consider whether its lessons still resonate today. In some settings, are Black Americans still treated as the “other,” and thus subjected to different, unjust standards? Do other non-majority populations face similar wrongs and indignities because of their race, religion or heritage? Learning the lessons of the Fort Lawton court-martial may help a new generation remain vigilant and understand the unrecoverable costs of discrimination, racism, and injustice.
In the era of the First World War and its aftermath, the quest to identify, restrict, and punish internal enemy “others,” combined with eugenic thinking, severely curtailed civil liberties for many people in Oregon and the nation. In Oregon’s Others, Kimberly Jensen analyzes the processes that shaped the growing surveillance state of the era and the compelling personal stories that tell its history.
To start, can you share a bit about your background and what led you to this study?
As a professor of history and gender studies it is my privilege to work with students, colleagues, and members of our community who are restoring the voices and experiences of diverse people to our collective history. In my previous books, Mobilizing Minerva: American Women and the First World War and Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism, I analyzed the history of women and citizenship rights as woman suffrage and the quest for a more complete female citizenship via service in the First World War came together.
In Oregon’s Others I explore the collisions between civic gains like voting for some people and the losses, often very violent and consequential losses, for others in this period using the lens of civil liberties and surveillance. It’s also very important to me to emphasize the many forms of resistance people used to address these violent and destructive processes. That resistance gives us hope in our own day.
Your book focuses on historical events and processes during and after the First World War. Can you help set the scene? How do we get from an era of so-called progressive reform to the exclusionary and reactionary postwar aftermath?
The era of “progressive” civic, legislative, and workplace reform from the 1890s to the First World War contained deep currents of exclusion, white supremacy, eugenic thinking, and discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender identity and presentation, class, ability, and nationality that limited the scope and effects of those reforms. Wartime and postwar “crises” and severe curtailment of civil liberties in the name of national security provided opportunities for some people to claim a more complete citizenship through loyalty to the state’s aims and programs but also destroyed civil liberties and safety for others.
Can you share a few examples from the book that reflect the ways that the war and eugenic policies expanded surveillance in the early twentieth century?
Wartime and eugenic policies created mutually reinforcing categories of “fit” and “unfit” people, loyal supporters of state projects, and dangerous internal enemy others who did not conform or who did not contribute to the state’s aims. Policymakers promoted surveillance as a vital tool to identify and punish enemy others. They deputized and pressured community members to help conduct that surveillance and report the results to local, state, and federal authorities in the name of loyalty and productive citizenship.
Anna Mary Weston was a second-generation German American railroad car cleaner in Portland who was the first woman in Oregon to be tried under the Sedition Act of May 1918 for speaking against the war effort. Federal agents questioned Weston and her co-workers at her workplace at North Bank Station and then arrested her. Her story illustrates the power of overlapping surveillance projects that create collateral scrutiny.
A federal jury later found Weston not guilty by reason of “mental incapacity” and frequent references to her “mental condition” meant she was also vulnerable in her workplace in this era of eugenic scrutiny. Weston was acquitted of federal sedition charges but authorities did not commit her to the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane in the aftermath of her verdict and additional sanity hearings, even though other family members were committed. The reason is something I try to unravel in the book.
Volunteer Sarah Evans, far right, and Portland police captain Leo Harms, far left, work to register noncitizen “enemy” women at the Portland Police Station on the first day of female “enemy alien” registration, June 17, 1918. “German Alien Women Appear for Registry,” Oregon Journal, June 17, 1918, 1.
The registration of noncitizen “enemies” during the war included German citizen women residing here and also women born in the United States who lost their US citizenship when they married German citizen men due to US naturalization policy in force at the time. Local and federal leaders also used “alien enemy” registration to police gender presentation and identity. Police or other agents could require anyone to provide proof of identity and registration.
Margarita Ojeda Wilcox, 1919. Oregon State Hospital Female Patient Files, Oregon State Archives, Salem.
Margarita Ojeda Wilcox fled the Mexican Revolution with her US citizen husband and went to the Oregon State Hospital for the Insane in 1919 to recover from what we might readily identify today as post-traumatic stress. Federal and state policy combined to target Ojeda Wilcox as a Latina born in Mexico and immigration officials and hospital administrators worked to deport her as she was also considered for possible eugenic sterilization. Ojeda Wilcox’s female patient file became a record of surveillance against her. But the same law that required women married to German citizen men to register as noncitizen enemies protected Ojeda Wilcox who became a US citizen upon marriage to her US-born husband. She gained her release without deportation or sterilization.
How does focusing on Oregon amplify our understanding of the nationwide restrictions and challenges to civil liberties going on during this time? In what ways is Oregon’s history unique in this respect?
During this period Oregon gained a “star state” reputation for workplace reform and the “Oregon System” of tools to restructure state and local government such as the referendum to bring more power to voters. The war brought additional “Oregon Firsts” including local and state policies to control sexually transmitted infections and detain women suspected of being infected; licensing laws for businesses and hotels to combat “vice” that targeted gender non-conforming people, sex workers, and Japanese business owners, including Issei women who managed rooming houses; and first-in-the-nation status in various wartime and postwar bond drives to support the government. This created even more pressure to be “first.”
In 1920 Oregon deputized residents to identify “mental defectives” in a singular statewide survey, and one Oregon policymaker advocated the eugenic sterilization of all first-generation Japanese women as a solution to the “Japanese Problem” a year later.
Oregon First “achievements” created a blueprint used by policymakers in other states and at the federal level to identify, surveil, and punish people considered dangerous internal enemies. Studying Oregon helps us see that blueprint, to understand how and why people created it, and suggests the importance of Oregon’s story in informing similar studies in other states, regions, and the nation.
What was your process of gathering the many compelling personal stories you share throughout the book?
Many state and federal archival materials and records of private organizations like the Oregon Social Hygiene Society were created by people intent on surveilling internal enemy others and punishing them. These records include Bureau of Investigation files; World War I “alien enemy” registration forms; files on people who refused to support the wartime Food Pledge campaign to conserve food; case notes on parolees of The Cedars detention home for girls and women suspected of carrying sexually transmitted infections; and Black Portlander Ruth Brown’s habeas corpus court challenge to the double-standard of women’s incarceration there.
The records also include Oregon State Hospital files; the 1920 “Oregon State Survey of Mental Defect, Delinquency, and Dependency”; federal “Industrial Surveys” of Indigenous people living on reservations; and a state “census” of Japanese Oregonians set in the context of a narrative based on fear of first-generation Issei women and their US-born citizen children.
“New Women’s Detention Home, ‘The Cedars’ Is Completed.” Sunday Oregonian, August 11, 1918, Section 1, 12.
These materials are housed across many different archives and libraries. This phase of the work absolutely depends on the incredible support of archivists and librarians who know these collections.
I believe we need to read and understand these records and the stories they reveal both as the tangible tools of exclusion and othering but also as vital evidence of people’s resilience and resistance in the face of these surveillance projects. To use the sources in this way is to challenge the surveillance projects and the ideas and actions at their foundation as we tell the stories of people at the center.
Then it is important to develop as much additional information as we can about the people whose lives and stories we encounter in these archival sources. Historic newspapers offer incredible details on people who have been left out of the larger historical narrative and the digitization of these newspapers is an invaluable help in this gathering process. This is also true for vital records.
For example, I was able to analyze birth certificates in the state from 1917 to 1918 to demonstrate that seventy percent of Issei women in Portland chose Japanese Oregonian midwives to help them with the birth of their child and to register the important evidence of their children’s births with the state as one way to resist attacks against them. Sometimes these materials are among the very few we have about people who otherwise left little in the historical record about their lives. I encourage all of us to support digitization projects in our communities for access and preservation of these materials.
By using this comparative approach across communities and across institutions we can amplify our understanding of the collective impact of the hunt for internal enemy others and see the destructive power of interconnected systems of discrimination and exclusion at work.
How do the themes in Oregon’s Others relate to present-day issues of civil liberties and surveillance in the state and beyond?
By tracing the growth of the surveillance state and challenges to civil liberties one hundred years ago and by chronicling the persistence and resistance of people in the face of that onslaught, we can hold up a mirror to our own day and think about ways forward to help repair that past and empower all people in our present and future.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
I hope readers will connect with people whose compelling voices and experiences are in the book and see themselves and their communities reflected in the stories the book brings to light. I also hope readers will find strong reasons to engage with the struggles of a century ago as we realize more than ever the constant need to maintain and fight for civil rights and civil liberties protections for all of us. The hunt for internal enemy others in our past can inform our present with the knowledge that unless everyone’s rights and liberties are protected, no one’s will be safe. I hope the study will bring home the destructive dangers of “us” versus “them” thinking and actions.
Kimberly Jensen is professor of history and gender studies at Western Oregon University and author of Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism and Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War.
Upcoming Events
September 14, 2024: Sisters Festival of Books with Paulina Springs Books, 11:00 a.m. PT Sisters Movie House, Sisters, OR
October 10, 2024: Sick Lecture Series at UW with the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest, 4:00 p.m. PT Petersen Room, Allen Library, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
October 16, 2024: Oregon’s Others Scholarship Symposium, 4:30 p.m. PT Columbia Room, Werner University Center, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR
October 19, 2024: PNW History Conference Gender & Sexuality panel, 10:30 a.m. PT Hilton Portland Downtown, Portland, OR
The Washington Center for the Book announced the finalists in seven categories for the 2024 Washington State Book Awards for outstanding books published by Washington authors in 2023. Congratulations to Peter Blecha (Stomp and Shout) and Tom Fucoloro (Biking Uphill in the Rain), who were both named finalists in the General Nonfiction/Biography category.
A winner in each category will be announced on September 24, 2024. Learn more about the UW Press finalists below.
Peter Blecha tells the story of music in the Pacific Northwest from the 1940s to the 1960s, a golden era that shaped generations of musicians to come. The local R&B scene evolved out of the area’s vibrant jazz scene, and Blecha illuminates the musical continuum between Ray Charles (who cut his first record in Seattle) and Quincy Jones to the rock ‘n’ rollers who forged the classic jazz-tinged “Northwest Sound.”
Highlighting key but overlooked figures and offering a fresh look at well-known musicians (such as an obscure young guitarist then known as Jimmy Hendrix), Blecha shows how an isolated region managed to launch influential new sounds upon an unsuspecting world.
“In a tour de force, Blecha offers all music fans the definitive book about the highly significant but much neglected story of Northwestern U.S. rock.”
Tom Fucoloro, founder and editor of Seattle Bike Blog, chronicles the rise of an improbable bike culture in the Emerald City. From the arrival of the first bicycles in the late nineteenth century to the bike-share entrepreneurs of the present day, the result is a unique perspective on Seattle’s history and its future. Advocates, policy makers, city planners, and bike enthusiasts around the world can learn plenty from the successes and failures of this city’s past 130 years.
More than just a mode of transportation, the bicycle has been used by generations of Seattleites as a tool for social change. Biking Uphill in the Rain documents the people and projects that made a difference and reveals just how deeply intertwined transportation is with politics, public health, climate change, and racial justice.
“The most informative and definitive history of bicycles and the bike movement in Seattle.”
In Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II, Holly Miowak Guise draws on a wealth of oral histories and interviews with Indigenous elders to explore the multidimensional relationship between Alaska Natives and the US military during the Pacific War. The forced relocation and internment of Unangax̂ in 1942 proved a harbinger of Indigenous loss and suffering in World War II Alaska. Violence against Native women, assimilation and Jim Crow segregation, and discrimination against Native servicemen followed the colonial blueprint. Yet Alaska Native peoples took steps to restore equilibrium to their lives by resisting violence and disrupting attempts at US control.
In the Q&A below, Guise shares more about her process of researching and writing the book as well as how Alaska Native peoples altered the colonial structures imposed upon them by maintaining Indigenous spaces and asserting sovereignty over their homelands.
As part of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association conference, taking place in Bodø, Norway from June 6 to 8, we are pleased to offer NAISA members a 30% discount. Find Alaska Native Resilience and other new and notable books through our virtual booth and take advantage of the conference discount with promo code WNAISA24 at checkout through June 30, 2024.
First, can you touch on your background and what led you to this study?
I am enrolled Iñupiaq born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. My family is from the village of Unalakleet. When I was growing up, I heard several stories from my grandparents about 1940s Alaska and assimilationist schools that punished my grandparents for speaking Iñupiat. I remember my grandpa Lowell Anagick talking about his time serving in the guerilla platoon known as the Alaska Territorial Guard with Muktuk Marston. I wanted to link these family histories to better understand the broader experiences of Alaska Natives during the war.
Can you share a bit about your process for conducting and compiling the oral histories of Alaska Native elders and veterans that are included throughout the book?
When I was an undergraduate majoring in Native American Studies at Stanford University, I began interviewing Alaska Native elders about racial segregation in the Alaska territory for my senior honors thesis. When I returned to oral histories as a graduate student at Yale University, I broadened the study. I wanted to better understand what was happening during the passage of the 1945 Alaska Equal Rights Act, which addressed racial segregation in Alaskan towns at businesses and public venues. This era included the Pacific War/World War II, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian Islands, and settler colonial projects that developed alongside imperial US projects.
Over the years, I have worked with several tribal organizations, including the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, the First Alaskans Institute, the Sealaska Heritage Institute, and the Fairbanks Native Association Elder Program, as well as several other senior centers and community-based organizations, including the Alaska Veteran’s Museum, for conducting oral histories. I found tremendous help from Alaskan community leaders, libraries, museums, and through word of mouth in the Alaska Native community. I try to name every person and organization in a timeline of my oral history research travels in the appendix. Some of my favorite interviews are ones that I conducted with elders and their descendants. Oral history is indeed family history and academic.
As colonialism seeks to unravel Indigenous peoples and nations including through land removal, relocation, and boarding school separations, the act of Indigenous peoples restoring equilibrium goes directly against a colonial structure.
Holly Miowak Guise
What are some instances of separation, exclusion, and segregation in Alaska that readers might be surprised to learn?
In listening to elders, including my own grandparents, it seemed unfathomable that Western government, missionaries, and powers tried to assimilate Native children, an incredibly vulnerable population, all while social exclusion existed in Alaskan towns where white residents sought to establish settlements in the post Gold Rush era. How could Native children be forced to abandon their Native languages and assimilate to Westernization when Western society excluded and separated Native people?
Readers might also find it interesting to learn that in certain regions of Alaska, for example in the southeast, WWII–era military ordinances sought to separate Native women from servicemen to prevent interracial dating, sex, and marriage. Unsurprisingly, Tlingit activists mobilized through the Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Alaska Native Sisterhood, writing letters to government officials and military leaders to end stigmatization directed at Native women as venereal. As oral histories show, in some cases Native women defied the ordinances by simply dating and marrying servicemen anyway.
Visiting the former gunnery at Point Davidson with Conrad Ryan Sr. and Karen Thompson, 2017. Karen points to where Metlakatlans fished and gathered herring eggs. Photo by the author.Totem pole honoring veterans in Metlakatla, October 2017. Photo by the author.
You write about what you call “equilibrium restoration.” Can you elaborate on this concept and share an example from the book?
It is probably common for writers to be unable to sleep, or to think deeply in the middle of the night. One such night, I thought about Alice Petrivelli’s story about her uncle banishing the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) doctor, H.O.K. Bauer, who brought physical harm, death by neglecting a patient, and sexual violence to the Atkan wartime relocation camp in southeast Alaska. I thought about the action of her uncle banishing the doctor, essentially expelling federal “aid,” and I realized he was trying to restore equilibrium for their people.
Conceptually, I found “equilibrium restoration” in a variety of settings where Alaska Native people resisted, expelled, and sometimes even appropriated or adopted colonial structures to maintain indigenization. As colonialism seeks to unravel Indigenous peoples and nations including through land removal, relocation, and boarding school separations, the act of Indigenous peoples restoring equilibrium goes directly against a colonial structure. Throughout the book, I try to show different ways that Alaska Natives restored equilibrium, sometimes through tribal mutual aid from Tlingit to relocated Unangax̂ during the war, which counteracted US colonial structures.
For Alice’s uncle, equilibrium restoration could be suddenly achieved in banishing the BIA physician. For others, like elder Nick Alokli from Kodiak, equilibrium restoration took his lifetime. The Western school teachers punished Nick as a child by slapping him with the straps from hip boots for speaking Sugpiaq, and yet, as an elder he returned to Sugpiaq by teaching it to the future generation of youth. He participated in the project of restoring his Indigenous language that colonialism sought to annihilate.
How has this colonial history manifested in Alaska Native communities today?
This is both an easy and hard question to answer. For those impacted by colonialism— through language theft, removal, family separations, sexual violence, and more—these dark histories impact individuals, families, communities, tribal nations, and the intricacies of daily life. These darker colonial histories can be felt, carried, and—I am going to be a bit more hopeful here and say—expelled over one’s lifetime or generations. Native people continue to try to unravel the harm of colonialism while reinstating their Indigenized nations, spaces, and livelihoods.
Gifts from elders in Juneau and Metlakatla, 2014. Signed book from Carol Brady (Tlingit), Southeast Traditional Values magnet from Marilyn Doyle (Tlingit), tea from Rosa Miller (Tlingit), copper earrings from Donald Gregory (Tlingit), kippered salmon from Dorothy Owen (Tlingit/Filipina), and doll fashioned by Roxee Booth (Tsimshian). Photo by the author.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
My main goal for this book is to center the voices, stories, and reflections of Alaska Native elders who witnessed settler colonialism alongside militarization during World War II. Elders shared an array of experiences depending on their tribal geography, gender, and their age at the time of war. I find it profound that so many elders (more than 90 from this study) challenged settler colonialism and discrimination and navigated the war all while clinging to their Indigenous identities and sovereignty. I tried to highlight background information about each elder quoted in the book so readers can better understand Indigenous perspectives. I wish readers will see how much care goes into oral history in building relationships with elders over time and connecting elders through resources by academic institutions as well as tribal and community-based organizations.
Photo by Haiden Renae (Navajo/Diné) directed by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi)
Holly Miowak Guise (Iñupiaq) is assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She is the creator of World War II Alaska, a digital humanities project that centers the voices of Alaska Native elders and veterans by bridging institutional, federal and university archives, tribal archives, and oral histories.
May is National Bike Month, a celebration and showcase of the benefits of bicycling promoted by the League of American Bicyclists since 1956. More than just a mode of transportation, the bicycle has been used by generations of Seattleites as a tool for social change. In Biking Uphill in the Rain, Seattle Bike Blog founder Tom Fucoloro tells the story of the rise of an improbable bike culture in this notoriously hilly and rainy city. The following is an excerpt from the book.
Use promo code WSPRING24 at checkout on our website for 40% off and free shipping during our Spring Sale, on now through May 31, 2024.
The Boeing bust gave Seattle a head start on the national recession of the 1970s, triggered by the 1973 oil crisis. As Seattle would see again in the 2008 recession, people seeking ways to save money in difficult economic times found that and much more in the humble bicycle. The seeds of Seattle’s 1970s bicycle movement had been planted in the previous decades. Bicycle sales grew throughout the 1950s and 1960s as lighter bikes with multiple gears and easy-to-use gear shifters and derailleurs became more widely available at the consumer level. By 1968, a new kind of bike-riding movement was forming, empowering advocates to push for bike-friendly changes to the city.
The moment that propelled bicycling into the civic spotlight was the brainchild of a woman who didn’t even ride a bike. It rained all day November 16, 1967, which is to say that it was a very typical Seattle evening when Mia Mann walked into the regular meeting of the Seattle Board of Park Commissioners with a simple idea that would change her city forever. Mann was active on city and nonprofit boards, especially in support of city beautification and arts efforts.
Mia decided to push an idea being tried out in her hometown of Minneapolis: a car-free streets event. She wrote a Seattle City Council resolution to create such an event, but her idea met resistance from those in charge. First, the Parks Department tried to ignore her, but she would have none of that. Then the Parks superintendent said they couldn’t do it because it would interfere with vehicle traffic and because the Parks Department didn’t have jurisdiction to close streets. Eventually, Mia got a powerful City Council member named Myrtle Edwards involved. Edwards was responsible for major parks efforts, including the city’s acquisition of a closing gas plant at the north end of Lake Union that would one day become Gas Works Park. Edwards ran with Mia’s open streets idea, gathering council support and convening multiple city departments to make it happen. Her support was more than enough to win approval from the Parks board that rainy evening. They agreed to hold one trial event in the spring just to see how it would go.
The plan was simple: put up signs closing a two-mile stretch of Lake Washington Boulevard to cars starting at Seward Park in South Seattle and heading north. They then invited people to bike freely on the boulevard and on the forested roads through Seward Park without fear of cars. The whole thing cost the city less than five hundred dollars, and Mia Mann, Harry Coe of the League of American Wheelmen (now known as the League of American Bicyclists), and coaches from Rainier Beach Cottage School volunteered to carry out much of the organizing and promotion. “People have to get hold of their lives and get out in the open,” Mia told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before the first Bicycle Sunday event. “The automobile just isn’t doing this for us. I haven’t ridden a bike in years, but I’ll be out there.”
The simple act of kicking cars off a street for a few hours demonstrated to people the benefits of public spaces without cars.
Tom Fucoloro
Nobody, it seems from news reports, expected the number of people who showed up April 28, 1968. An estimated five thousand people brought their bikes to Lake Washington during the seven hours the road was closed to cars. City leaders clamored to show their support for the popular event and call for more. Soon the city was hosting Bicycle Sundays several times a month in locations across the city. More than half a century later, the Parks Department still hosts Bicycle Sunday on the same stretch of Lake Washington Boulevard.
But Bicycle Sunday did more than just create a fun space for a few hours. The simple act of kicking cars off a street for a few hours demonstrated to people the benefits of public spaces without cars. Cars require an enormous amount of space, and by the late 1960s nearly all street space had long been the domain of car travel and storage. In the city’s deeply entrenched car culture, getting out on a bike on a car-free street could be a radical experience.
The start of Bicycle Sunday in 1968 was something of a coming-out party for Seattle’s growing bicycle revival. Politicians saw that many people were deeply interested in biking; people with bikes realized they should use their numbers to get organized and start asking for better conditions for biking; and people who didn’t bike saw the crowds and thought it looked like fun. Within weeks of the first event, Harry Coe was rallying political support for a citywide bike route network. Signed bike routes were a small step, but they could be done quickly and represented perhaps the first time since the turn of the twentieth century that the city’s Department of Engineering was tasked with thinking about how someone on a bike might get around town.
Coe was a runner for Team USA during the 1908 London Olympics and had biked all over Seattle as a child. “You could ride downtown without much competition from automobiles,” he told the Seattle Times in 1968. Coe also wrote a letter to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer around the same time saying that the first Bicycle Sunday reminded him of those early days. “It was a day which will be long remembered as one of Seattle’s finest for a lot of people who too seldom get together at one place to enjoy something which they all have in common, namely, love of bicycle riding,” he wrote. He was eighty-three in 1968 when the city started putting up his long-sought bike-route signs. The sheer number of bicyclists who participated in the first Bicycle Sunday gave the plan the popular push it needed to win approval. Signs started going up within months of the first event, and fifty miles of signed bike routes were installed across the city in the first year. Some of these green signs are still in place, bearing a pictogram of a bicycle and reading simply “Bike Route.”
Tom Fucoloro will discuss Biking Uphill in the Rain at the Edmonds Public Library on May 29 at 6:00 pm in partnership with North Sound Bicycle Advocates.
Tom Fucoloro is founder ofSeattle Bike Blog and has served as its editor since 2010. He was named one of “15 People Who Should Really Run Seattle” by Seattle Met magazine. In 2023, he won the Doug Walker Award for his work to improve lives through bicycling from the Cascade Bicycle Club.
The following is an excerpt from Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers. In the first biography of one of Montana‘s most celebrated writers, author Rebecca McCarthy draws on their long friendship as well as stories from friends, family, colleagues, and others to reveal the forces and events that shaped the author-educator and formed the bedrock of his beloved stories.
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When Norman and his father stepped off the train in Hanover, New Hampshire, they found themselves in a small New England village of clapboard buildings and white picket fences. A walk around town confirmed that Hanover was a fraction of the size of Missoula. Where Hanover ended, Dartmouth College began. Its buildings bordered a long, open expanse called “the Green” that had been part of the school for more than 150 years. It was a small, all-male college in an isolated town. The winters were sure to be long, cold, and dark.
A notation in his high school yearbook shows Norman had listed as his college choice Washington and Jefferson, a small liberal arts college south of Pittsburgh founded by Presbyterian missionaries in the late 1700s. But he changed his plans. Norman told me Harvard had accepted him and that he thought about going, but he eventually decided not to, a decision his father seconded. Norman chose Dartmouth, he told his interviewers, because it was “the only outdoor college in the country,” and he assumed the woodsy setting would remind him of Montana. All too soon, he learned he was wrong. In Missoula, which sits at the confluence of five valleys, he had been able to see mountains wherever he went. In Hanover, elms and maples hid the vista. The White Mountains were far away. Most of his father’s family was in Boston, more than an hour south on the train.
At Dartmouth in the 1920s, the majority of students were privileged, white, wealthy young New Englanders. Some of their fathers and grandfathers had attended Dartmouth. They knew little about the Rocky Mountains and less about Montana, other than childhood tales about George Armstrong Custer and history lessons on Lewis and Clark’s expedition. Norman felt they looked down on him because his family wasn’t rich. I later learned that the clubby atmosphere had choked Norman, who told his friend Gwin Kolb that he felt “like an uncouth kid from Montana.” While many of his classmates were learning to sail and play polo, Norman had been fighting forest fires and leading pack mules in the Bitterroot Mountains. And though he spoke and wrote well, he was constantly having to explain himself, his hometown, his lineage, and his reasons for coming to Dartmouth. Doing so had exasperated him.
Even in his later years, Norman failed to resolve his antagonistic attitude toward the affluent. “He had a hatred of big money in the abstract,” said his son-in-law, Joel Snyder. “He could be very difficult, but at the same time, he could be very gracious with wealthy people.” [His wife] Jessie’s attitudes were clearer. She had been a fan of the International Workers of the World, the radical Wobblies, and she later became and remained, like Norman, an unreconstructed Roosevelt Democrat.
The most memorable figure in college for Norman was former Dartmouth student Robert Frost, then in his late forties. The poet was an occasional teacher at the college and had a free hand in instructing his students. Norman said Frost “talked straight to you, and often poetry was there, or something close to it.” Classes met once a week, in the evening, in a “great big basement room with a wonderful fireplace.” The subject was creative writing, but Frost apparently never bothered to read his students’ papers. Instead, he would pace back and forth in front of the class, talking and talking. There were never any questions in Frost’s classes, Norman said, and “nobody ever stopped him.”
Joel Snyder took this photo of Norman in Jackson Park on a crisp fall day in 1975, after the University of Chicago Press had accepted A River Runs Through It and Other Stories for publication. Norman is standing on the Clarence Darrow Bridge. Photo courtesy of Joel Snyder.
Norman studied hard, later claiming he read a book a day, but he realized he would have to suppress his sardonic sense of humor in class. He became a C student—an accomplishment, given his meager high school education and his many extracurricular activities. He found ways to thrive outside the classroom. He joined Beta Theta Pi and promptly began relieving his fraternity brothers of their money around the poker table. A friend visiting from Montana was astounded that the college boys “didn’t know not to draw from an inside straight.” In a local gym, Norman boxed with fraternity members and men from the community and enjoyed knocking down opponents. He became a staff member of the Dartmouth Bema, a literary magazine, and the Aegis, the Dartmouth yearbook. He was selected for Sphinx, the oldest of Dartmouth’s many secret societies. He was on the board of governors for The Arts, “a clearing house for the ideas and opinions of those interested in the fields of literature, drama and music.” Among the writers coming to campus during his senior year were journalist and critic Rebecca West and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. How he felt about meeting and hearing these women, we don’t know, but I do know he liked Millay’s poetry.
Before Norman graduated, in June 1924, Dartmouth English professor David Lambuth asked if he wanted to return to campus and teach freshman composition. Lambuth had had Norman in a few of his classes and was impressed with his writing ability and his sensitivity to language. Norman accepted the offer, telling an interviewer the class “was full of some poker buddies of mine, and I figured it would be a good way to pay back some debts.”
Norman went home to Montana to work for the US Forest Service, gathering some of the experiences he would later turn into stories. He had spent most summers working for the Forest Service, except for part of 1921, when his father [Reverend Maclean], [brother] Paul, and he worked on a log cabin on the shore of Seeley Lake, on land leased to them by the federal government. Norman returned to the halls of Hanover in the autumn of 1924 as an instructor of introductory English, and his brother went with him to start on his Dartmouth degree. The Reverend couldn’t afford to pay for two sons to attend private school at the same time, so Paul had taken classes at Montana State (later renamed the University of Montana) in Missoula for a year before heading east.
In the early 1970s, forester John B. Roberts Jr. took this photo of Seeley Lake and the Swan Range from Double Arrow Lookout. Built in 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, Double Arrow was one of many lookouts scattered across western Montana. A seasonal employee would staff each lookout, radioing into the district office any suspicious smokes that could blossom into forest fires. Today the lookout is rented to those wanting to stay a night or two. Photo courtesy of the author.
Bravig Imbs, one of Norman’s contemporaries, offers a glimpse of some events in Norman’s life while he was an instructor, in The Professor’s Wife. The professor and the wife are based on Lambuth and his wife, Myrtle. Imbs worked as a butler for the Lambuths, which gave him a bird’s-eye view of their lives. Norman makes an appearance in the book as the character Douglas MacNeil, “an exceptional person” with a sensitive and crooked smile, who comes to write in the couple’s study. The David Lambuth character says Douglas’s poetry “had the streak of genius” and that a novel he was working on was the best poetic prose he had read.
In addition to his own writing, Norman was busy teaching undergraduates how to construct sentences. He told the story of an “observer” visiting his class one session, a redheaded Scotch atheist he admired, Professor James Dow McCallum, whose lectures on Victorian writers were very popular. Weeks passed with no feedback. Norman at last went to McCallum’s office. The professor was surprised to see him. Norman asked McCallum how to improve his teaching, and McCallum told him to wear a different suit every day of the week. When Norman said he couldn’t afford so many suits, McCallum suggested he wear a different necktie. He followed this advice through his long teaching career at Chicago.
For Norman, the occasional amusement provided by his struggling students—one wrote that the primeval forest was “where the hand of man had never set foot”—failed to compensate for Dartmouth’s caste system. Maybe he was struggling with his own writing or tiring of the décor in Mrs. Lambuth’s study. The problems Norman had faced as an undergraduate now only worsened. The stratified society of the English department, in which instructors were socially segregated from tenured professors, added to the sense of moneyed clubbiness and made a lonely Montanan long for the West. Norman’s brother, Paul, had already gone home to Montana, skipping the 1926 spring semester.
Norman squirmed in the dinner jacket he was required to wear to departmental functions. Even the everyday clothes worn by the students set Norman on edge: the pullover sweaters and black-and-white saddle shoes of Joe College.
In June 1926, after two years as an instructor, Norman rode the train out of Hanover to Missoula and back to a job in the woods. In the fall, as the time came to return to New Hampshire, his father helped him realize he wasn’t bettering himself by teaching at Dartmouth. Alone, Paul boarded the train, heading east. Norman wrote to Professor Lambuth, telling him that he wasn’t coming back and asking if someone else could take his classes. He didn’t return to Hanover for decades.
He never wore a tuxedo again.
About the Author
Freelance writer, editor, and poet Rebecca McCarthy spent twenty-one years as an award-winning reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has written for the New York Times, Fast Company, the Bitter Southerner, and the American Scholar, among other publications. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago, where she was a recipient of the Norman Maclean Scholarship for an Outstanding English Student. She worked for the US Forest Service in Region 1 as a forest fire fighter and a timber beast.
The vast and diverse California coast is an awe-inspiring place of exploration and discovery, full of life forms that are shockingly unfamiliar.
In the newly released guidebook Between the Tides in California—a follow-up to the popular Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon—scientific experts reveal the hidden worlds of the intertidal zone, profiling sites from the remote northern seashores to the popular beaches of Southern California. Richly illustrated and accessibly written, the book transforms readers into nearshore detectives, with each species offering unique clues about the environment around them.
What inspired you to write this book?
Ryan P. Kelly: This book was a long time coming. I was sitting in California—in 2011, before I moved to Seattle and UW—and drafted the original sketch. The idea was to do a roadside guide to ecology, focusing on the intertidal, aimed at a curious, outgoing public. Terrie, John, and I are all originally from California, and we asked Pat to be a part of this book both because of his deep knowledge and because he’s actually in place there in Southern California, while the rest of us live in Seattle.
John J. Meyer: For me, it was an opportunity to pay homage of sorts to the place and coastline I love the most. The West Coast is truly spectacular—all of it—but the beaches and tidepools of California are where I fell in love with the ocean in the first place.
Patrick J. Krug: It’s a lucky few of us who have been able to live immersed, literally and figuratively, in the study of marine biology. Not much beats the fun of sharing everything you’ve seen, read, and been taught over a lifetime with other people who like to explore and learn about the ocean.
When people see me working in the intertidal and ask what I’m doing, it only takes a few minutes to show them how to find animals they’ve never seen before. I wanted the book to be like having four marine biologists in your pocket, pointing out sea creatures you may have overlooked your whole life.
Patrick J. Krug
As research scientists, why write a book for the broader public? Did you perceive a specific need?
RPK: It just seemed like ecology deserved the kind of treatment that geology has gotten in the Roadside Guide to Ecology series. There are lots of guides to shells and seashore creatures, but it seemed like nothing explained why a thing was here and not elsewhere. The why seemed important to explain to a broader audience.
JJM: As a researcher turned policy specialist turned communications professional, I have seen firsthand the importance of making science broadly accessible to all people. If we can help do that for our oceans, I am all for it.
PJK: Right now there’s so much curiosity and appreciation for the ocean paired with concern about how to protect our coast from escalating human impacts. It felt like the right time to talk about the shoreline we love in accessible terms to anyone looking to explore, learn, and be inspired.
In writing this book did you learn new things that differ from your day-to-day research activities? If so, what?
RPK: I loved getting the chance to look up facts and distinguish them from scientific lore and rumor. We all learned a ton. And as my day-to-day work has pulled me away from the intertidal, this was a great opportunity to reimmerse myself in some real-world ecology.
TK: I learned a great deal from my coauthors, whose specializations are somewhat different from mine. For instance, who knew that gumboot chitons have magnetite in their teeth? Or that hermit crabs can be extremely picky in choosing a new shell to inhabit?
PJK: I spent a lot more time thinking about places instead of species. I do a lot of biodiversity discovery work, finding and naming new species, so I’m often thinking: what is special and different about this organism, what sets it apart from every other form of life? But for this book, we wanted to give the character of places—what do you find on this beach, and why is it here? It was a different challenge to capture in photos and words the feel of each rocky point or sandy cove that we profiled along the Golden State’s epic coast.
The intertidal community at Big Sur’s Partington Cove is typical of high-energy environments where wave-tolerant species dominate the shore. Photograph by the authors.
Many Californians are familiar with Ed Ricketts’s Between Pacific Tides published in 1939. Is there any connection between your book and his?
RPK: Those are very, very big shoes to fill, and I wouldn’t say we were aiming to fill them at all. Inevitably our book does have thematic overlap with Ricketts, but he was setting out the language of intertidal ecology for what was probably the first time for a relatively popular audience. That book is pretty dense with detail; we have tried to stick to a more narrative style and to focus on geographic patterns that visitors are likely to notice in a day at the shore.
TK: Between Pacific Tides was formative for all four of us—you might say that as students we were weaned on that book. I’ve been carting around a copy for almost fifty years, and I still use it. But we did not set out to replicate it—that would be impossible.
How did you approach the main themes of the book and bring them to life?
RPK: It’s easy to write about things you love and find fascinating. I’d say we just tried to convey that enthusiasm—I hope it worked.
JJM: This book is filled with photos of ocean and tidepool habitats, which was intentional; you can read and see the magic of the California coast. I hope they help transport the reader to these special places and that readers then become inspired to go see them in person!
PJK: When people see me working in the intertidal and ask what I’m doing, it only takes a few minutes to show them how to find animals they’ve never seen before. I wanted the book to be like having four marine biologists in your pocket, pointing out sea creatures you may have overlooked your whole life, to tell you about their hidden world, their challenges, and the incredible adaptations that let them thrive in the unforgiving world of the intertidal zone.
The Mendocino Headlands, carved from a jumble of metamorphic and sedimentary rock, form rugged boundaries between land and sea. Photograph by the authors.
Is there a location in the book that is your favorite? What about that location makes it special?
TK: Hands down, my favorite is Partington Cove on the Big Sur coast. It’s a truly magical spot.
JJM: Terrie turned me on to Partington Cove too, which was new for me and now ranks among my favorites. But the intertidal on the Stornetta Lands in Mendocino County I think is my favorite; the diversity of micro-habitats is immense, which leads to lots of diversity in the organisms that live there. And the rugged coastline as a backdrop only makes it that much more special!
PJK: I wanted to find the outrageously neon pink sea slug, Hopkins Rose, so I went back to the same rock channel in La Jolla, San Diego where I first found this species thirty years ago. And they were right where I left them in my early twenties, same exact spot. A great puzzle in marine ecology is how rare species persist in one place in a dynamic, turbulent ocean. This was a wonderful illustration of that mystery for me.
Everyone has a favorite species or two. Which species in the book are your favorites, and why?
TK: It’s hard to beat giant kelp (Macrocystic pyrifera) for sheer majesty—but giant kelp is not an intertidal species. In the intertidal, I might vote for the kelp Lessoniopsis littoralis. Its common name—flat pom-pom kelp—does it no justice. This kelp lives in only the gnarliest wave-swept spots and can survive for many years. Its thick stipe is reminiscent of a tree trunk, helping it tolerate the onslaught of waves where few other organisms can persist. To me, it’s the oak tree of the intertidal.
JJM: Almost impossible to pick, but I’ll go with the Spanish shawl. It’s such a crowd-pleaser, fairly common, and simply stunning to see with its bright purple body and orange mane against the greens and browns of a tidepool.
PJK: I always hunt for two elusive species of limpet (small snails) that can usually be found, with some effort, by their special “home turf.” One lives only on the feather-boa kelp, blending in with its glossy brown shell. Its relative glides up and down the narrow blades of surfgrass, like a dime cut in half. Both are marvelously adapted to their different hosts, and the kelp and grass benefit from the pruning and cleaning activities of their little shelled gardeners. There’s something special to me about knowing you can always go back and find your old friends waiting right where you left them if you know their haunts—not too different from people.
A sea slug, the Spanish shawl (Flabellinopsis iodinea), found below Sunken City, near Los Angeles harbor. Photography by the authors.
What are the most important messages conveyed in the book? What do you hope that readers will gain?
RPK: Once you start to notice a thing in the world, once it appears on your mental map, you’re likely to start to care about it. That was a core goal here: help others see what we see when we visit the coast, with the likely outcome that others will start to feel about these places the way that we feel about them.
TK: The California coast is magical for so many reasons. But some of that magic can get lost amid its crushing popularity. We wanted to capture some of the beauty and intrigue that can still be found along this coast. It is an absolutely stunning place.
JJM: There are still wild, thriving places, even in the most populous state in the union. Of course, that’s because all the right natural ingredients are there, but it’s also because of the choices people have made. Californians place a high value on their coast, and as such protect it and care for it in many awesome ways. It’s great to see that investment pay off—many special places remain and are there for all to experience.
PJK: To me, the book is about why each beach and bluff in California has a unique vibe and look. The chapters should help readers find new places to explore, and unpack the backstory of the marine life, rock formations, dune plants, and birds a visitor might see on a given outing. My experience is that the more people learn about the ocean, the more they are inspired to protect it, so I hope that a deeper understanding of California’s coast will bring readers a passion for conservation—and more fun on every trip to the beach.
Fossil shells are exposed in the cliffs behind Moonstone Beach south of Trinidad.The starburst anemone (Anthopleura sola) occupies rocky habitates at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve.The sedimentary substrates—mudstones, siltstones, and sandstones—found along much of the California coast can be covered in cavities known as tafoni. Common in granular surfaces, they are likely created through abrasion, wind erosion, salt weathering, and other mechanisms.
How does this book differ from field guides, textbooks, or other books on intertidal communities?
RPK: My bookshelf is full of similar books. Did the world need another one? We thought yes, because we were filling an unfilled niche. The book is about why rather than about what: why some things live here and not there, and how a person can learn to read a beach and glean meaning from the patterns of life on the shore. We think that’s unique among books in print.
PJK: I felt people would like the beach version of a travel guide that tells you what not to miss when you visit a place, explaining the history of that particular fountain, wall, or monument: why it’s special and remarkable, who put it there, the historical context that will enrich your experience standing in front of it. We have that for Berlin and Rome, why not for the California coastline? I also don’t think scientists are always great at speaking plainly to people, at capturing the wonder they themselves feel about nature in their writing or images. That’s probably because we are trained to be dispassionate and technical in our work, but we love what we study, and I wanted that exuberance to come through (along with some good ecology) for the interested reader!
What’s the best way for readers to approach this book?
RPK: There are lots of photos, sidebars, maps, and so on, which some readers might find as useful points of entry. It’s quite readable (we think) straight through, too, but we were aiming to stay away from sounding like a textbook. My hope is that you can throw it in your car and pull it out on a road trip along the coast.
PJK: Like a literal choose-your-own-adventure book. Decide where you want to go: maybe it’s nearby, or you’ve never been there before, or a photo catches your imagination. Take a drive, go for a walk in the sea breeze and sunshine, and make a new discovery. One thing should lead to another, and then another. . . and if you hit the end of a chapter, flip to a random page and start again.
About the Authors
Ryan P. KellyTerrie KlingerPatrick J. KrugJohn J. Meyer
Ryan P. Kelly is professor of marine and environmental affairs at the University of Washington. Terrie Klinger is professor of marine and environmental affairs and co-director of the Washington Ocean Acidification Center at the University of Washington. Patrick J. Krug is professor of biological sciences at California State University, Los Angeles. John J. Meyer is senior director of marketing and communications in the College of the Environment at the University of Washington.
For Earth Month 2024, we invite you to explore environmental awareness, advocacy, and resilience through curated reading lists. Browse books in environmental studies below and don’t miss our past selection of books on the natural world with a focus on the Pacific Northwest.
Capturing Glaciers:A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming Photographs of receding glaciers are one of the most well recognized visualizations of human-caused climate change. Historian Dani Inkpen explores the use of repeat glacier photographs, examining what they show, what they obscure, and how they influence public understanding of nature and climate change.
The Toxic Ship: The Voyage of the Khian Sea and the Global Waste Trade Environmental historian Simone M. Müller uses the infamous voyage of the Khian Sea as a lens to elucidate the global trade in hazardous waste from the 1970s to the present day, exploring the story’s international nodes and detailing the downside of environmental conscientiousness among industrial nations as waste is pushed outward. Shedding light on environmental racism and justice, The Toxic Ship is “a deft philosophical and literary examination about what we throw away, where our discards go, who is harmed, and why” (Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains).
Cherokee Earth Dwellers: Stories and Teachings of the Natural World Ayetli gadogv—to “stand in the middle”—is at the heart of a Cherokee perspective of the natural world. Emerging from a deep and continuing collaboration between Christopher B. Teuton, Hastings Shade, Loretta Shade, and others, Cherokee Earth Dwellers offers a rich understanding of nature grounded in Cherokee creature names, oral traditional stories, and reflections of knowledge holders. From clouds to birds, oceans to quarks, this expansive Cherokee view of nature reveals a living, communicative world and humanity’s role within it.
Settler Cannabis: From Gold Rush to Green Rush in Indigenous Northern California Yurok scholar Kaitlin Reed situates the booming California cannabis industry—dubbed the “green rush”—within a broader legacy of settler colonial resource extraction and wealth accumulation in the state. Revealing the ongoing impacts on Indigenous cultures, lands, waters, and bodies, Reed shares this history to inform the path toward an alternative future. Combining archival research with testimonies and interviews with tribal members, tribal employees, and settler state employees, Settler Cannabis offers a groundbreaking analysis of the environmental consequences of cannabis cultivation that foregrounds Indigenous voices, experiences, and histories.
Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future In this “eminently readable, elegantly precise treatise on the topic of batteries” (Science)—a finalist for the Cundill History Prize—James Morton Turner unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving “the battery problem” is critical to a clean energy future. With new insight on the consequences for people and communities on the front lines, Turner draws on the past for crucial lessons that will help us build a just and clean energy future, from the ground up.
After the Blast: The Ecological Recovery of Mount St. Helens Eric Wagner takes readers on a fascinating journey of Mount St. Helens through the perspective of forest scientist Jerry Franklin, who helicoptered into the blast area a couple of weeks after the eruption. From fireweed to elk, the plants and animals Franklin saw in the blast area and beyond would not just change how ecologists approached the eruption and its landscape, but also prompt them to think in new ways about how life responds in the face of seemingly total devastation—a “superb look at scientists and science at work” (Publishers Weekly).
Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape In this study of disaster, modernization, and fishing communities, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi examines the complex relationship between commercial fishing families and the Joban Sea—once known for premium-quality fish and now notorious as the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe. In response to unrelenting setbacks, fishing communities have developed survival strategies shaped by the precarity they share with their marine ecosystem. The collaborative resilience that emerges against this backdrop of vulnerability and uncertainty challenges the progress-bound logic of futurism, bringing more hopeful possibilities for the future into sharper focus.
The River That Made Seattle: A Human and Natural History of the Duwamish With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river has been its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Using previously unpublished accounts by Indigenous people and settlers, BJ Cummings’s compelling narrative restores the river to its central place in Seattle and Pacific Northwest history. Writing from the perspective of environmental justice—and herself a key figure in river restoration efforts—Cummings vividly portrays the people and conflicts that shaped the region’s culture and natural environment and offers a call for action in aligning decisions about the river and its future with values of collaboration, respect, and justice.
Anticipating Future Environments: Climate Change, Adaptive Restoration, and the Columbia River Basin Ecological restoration is often premised on the idea of returning a region to an earlier, healthier state. Yet the effects of climate change undercut that premise and challenge the ways scientists can work, destabilizing the idea of “normalcy” and revealing the politics that shape what scientists can do. Using the restoration efforts in the Columbia River Basin as a case study, UW research scientist Shana Lee Hirsch explores how climate change affects the daily work of scientists, and how a scientific field itself can adapt to climate change.
Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement In this engaging and thought-provoking book, Gina G. Warren digs into the history and food politics of the backyard chicken movement, chronicling her own misadventures raising chickens and attempts at sustainable eating. The result is a fresh and charming story that also raises questions about sustainable farming, industrial agriculture, and our connections with the animals we love.
In recognition of Earth Month, we’re sharing books that will inspire you to go out and explore. With information on how to forage edible and medicinal plants, dig razor clams, create a garden of native plants, and more, these books offer a deeper understanding and appreciation of the natural world.
Between the Tides in Washington and Oregon and Between the Tides in California These essential guides to exploring beaches and tidepools of the Pacific Coast feature full-color photographs, site profiles, fascinating stories of animal and plant species, and an accessible introduction to how coastal ecosystems work—perfect for beachgoers who want to know why.
Seattle Walks: Discovering History and Nature in the City Bestselling author and popular science writer David B. Williams will give you a new appreciation for how Seattle has changed over time, how the past has influenced the present, and how nature is all around us—even in our urban landscape. Ranging along trails and sidewalks, these guided walks lead to panoramic views, intimate hideaways, and beautiful greenways.
Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: The Pacific Northwest and British Columbia We’re hard-pressed to choose just one of horticulturalist and arboriculturist Collin Varner’s indispensable guides to the natural world of the Pacific Northwest, but this compact, full-color forager’s guide is a great place to start. The region is home to a multitude of edible and medicinal plant species, edible mushrooms, and marine plants, and this book offers clear photography, descriptions, safety tips, and warnings, as well as culinary and medicinal uses from Indigenous Peoples and settlers, for more than 150 wild-growing flora species.
Razor Clams: Buried Treasure of the Pacific Northwest Challenging to dig, delicious to eat, and providing a heady experience of abundance, razor clams are entwined with Washington state’s commerce, identity, and history. Author David Berger shares his love affair of the Pacific razor clam and gets into the nitty-gritty of how to dig, clean, and cook them in this lively history and celebration of the Siliqua patula.
Flora of the Pacific Northwest: An Illustrated Manual A classic since it was first published in1973, this tome covering Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia is the most comprehensive reference on Pacific Northwest vascular plants for professional and amateur botanists, ecologists, rare plant biologists, plant taxonomy instructors, land managers, nursery professionals, and gardeners—“a must for your home garden library” (Washington Park Arboretum Bulletin).
Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest abounds with native plants that bring beauty to the home garden while offering food and shelter to birds, bees, butterflies, and other wildlife. Whether you’re a novice or expert gardener, renowned botanist Art Kruckeberg and horticulturist Linda Chalker-Scott show you how to imagine and realize your perfect sustainable landscape.
Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon Michael Engelhard‘s thought-provoking and beautifully illustrated iconography of the polar bear brings this elusive and powerful animal into focus. Eight thousand years of artifacts attest to its charisma, and to the fraught relationships between our two species. Drawing on meticulous research, Engelhardtraces and illuminates this intertwined history. Doing so, he delves into the stories we tell about Nature—and about ourselves—hoping for a future in which such tales still matter.
Spirit Whales and Sloth Tales: Fossils of Washington State In this richly illustrated guide to the amazing array of fossils found in Washington state, renowned paleontologist Elizabeth A. Nesbitt teams up with David B. Williams to offer a fascinating, richly illustrated tour through more than a half billion years of natural history. The spectacular paleontology of the state is brought to life through details of the fossils’ discovery and extraction, their place in geological time, and the insights they provide into contemporary issues like climate change and species extinction.
Fishes of the Salish Sea: Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca This comprehensive three-volume set, featuring striking illustrations of the Salish Sea’s 260 fish species by noted illustrator Joseph Tomelleri, details the ecology and life history of each species and recounts the region’s rich heritage of marine research and exploration. Beginning with jawless hagfishes and lampreys and ending with the distinctive Ocean Sunfish, leading scientists Theodore Wells Pietsch and James Orr present the taxa in phylogenetic order, based on classifications that reflect the most current scientific knowledge.
Birds of the Pacific Northwest: A Photographic Guide Spanning a vast, distinctive region rich in protected wildlands and iconic national parks, this bestselling field guide is a superlative, complete resource for enjoying the many bird species found from British Columbia to southern Oregon. Renowned bird experts Tom Aversa, Richard Cannings, and Hal Opperman illuminate the key identification traits, vocalizations, seasonal statuses, habitat preferences, and feeding behaviors of bird species in the region. The compact, full-page accounts feature maps and more than 900 photographs by top bird photographers.
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